Did you know that Netlify allows for you to have a configuration file to tell it how to deploy your project?
There is a special netlify.toml file that can be used for many settings you can configure when deploying your site. I want to focus on the redirects in this post specifically.
When building a site Netlify gives you a random-word-phrase.netlify.app domain. This is useful for a single app where you dont need a custom domain attached.
I recently moved to Netlify for hosting instead of GitHub Pages to publish my Jekyll site. the setup and move was easy to do too. I did get my random-word-phrase.netlify.app subdomain initally, but you can change that. So I changed mine to cjerrington.netlify.app to match some of the other naming schemes of other items.
I found this post on Moving your Jekyll site to Netfify, and Netlify makes this easy as well straight from your dashboard when making a new project with them.
Once the site was built, I could go to cjerrington.netlify.app and (once DNS was update) claytonerrington.com, but just like www.claytonerrington.com forwards to the APEX domain, I wanted the *.netlify.app to auto redirect which it does not from the website configurations.
Thus comes in the redirects:
[[redirects]]
from = "https://cjerrington.netlify.app/"
to = "https://claytonerrington.com"
status = 301
force = truePretty simple right? Now there is another option. To add a _redirects file, and with Jekyll we need to include this in our _config.yml file for building.
This syntax is pretty simple as well.
# Redirects from what the browser requests to what we serve
/home /
/blog/my-post.php /blog/my-post
/news /blog
/cuties https://www.petsofnetlify.comWhen you hit /home we want to redirect that to the root of the domain /. This redirect could be realated to how a .htaccess file works as well for redirects.
As mentioned earlier, there are plenty of config options you can use with the netlify.toml file.